U. of C. to bid for Fermilab

School hopes to bring new accelerator to site

For more than 20 years Fermilab in Batavia has held bragging rights both impressive and arcane: It is home to the world's most powerful atomic particle accelerator, the Tevatron.

But Fermilab will lose that title next year when a new machine in Switzerland and France fires up. Moreover, with the Tevatron scheduled to shut down in 2010 it means that America's longstanding leadership in particle physics will slip away to Europe and Asia. It also signals the likely end of Fermilab and its 2,000 jobs and $315 million annual operating budget.

Administrators at the University of Chicago don't want to see that happen, and their first step in saving Fermilab and keeping America at the forefront of particle physics will occur Thursday when they submit a bid to become Fermilab's co-administrator.

Should that happen, the U. of C. intends to build a new physics machine at Fermilab, a multibillion-dollar, 18-mile-long facility dubbed the International Linear Collider. It would complement and compete with the European accelerator in seeking to unravel nature's most fundamental secrets.

"We bring leadership," said Thomas Rosenbaum, University of Chicago research vice president, "and a single point of accountability."

The Tevatron remains a wonder of engineering, a 4-mile-around electronic racetrack that accelerates streams of protons to nearly light speed and slams them head-on into opposing streams of antimatter protons. Particles that fly out of these subatomic collisions provide scientists with clues about the makeup of atoms and how matter converts to energy.

Since its inception in 1967, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has been operated by a collaboration of 90 research universities. That group included the University of Chicago, but it had no special role.

Under the proposal to be submitted to the U.S. Department of Energy, which funds Fermilab, the U. of C. would be an equal partner with Universities Research Association Inc. It would also include Northwestern University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois and Northern Illinois University in oversight advisory roles.

If Fermilab is to survive beyond the Tevatron, it must begin work to build a giant new physics machine, or find another mission, said Rosenbaum.

The situation echoes the 1980s, when the federal government agreed to build a superconducting supercollider that would be more powerful than the Tevatron, but decided to put the new machine in Texas rather than Illinois. Later, amid cost overruns, Congress canceled the supercollider, and Fermilab upgraded the Tevatron, giving it new life.

The Tevatron has helped physicists prove that their still-incomplete view of the natural world, called the Standard Model, is accurate as far as it goes. The Tevatron has identified the subatomic particle known as the top quark, one of the building blocks of protons in the nuclei of atoms. These discoveries confirmed that quarks come in three families that include particles seldom seen outside accelerator experiments.

While the focus of particle physics is esoteric to most people, doing the science has often led to technology breakthroughs with widespread benefits. The graphics-based Web grew out of physicists' need to send large amounts of data expressed as images to colleagues worldwide.

Advances in supercold superconducting magnets used in the Tevatron were later applied to CT X-ray imaging used in medicine. Consumer electronics gadgetry is also an outgrowth of particle physics.

Now it is the European physics machine that has the edge. Straddling the Swiss-French border outside Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider consists of a circular track that accelerates protons, and it is bigger and about seven times more powerful than the Tevatron.

If America and Fermilab hope to retain a leadership role in particle physics, they would need to build a different kind of machine that will accelerate lighter particles--electrons and their antimatter counterparts--for high-speed collisions. Such a machine would provide a much sharper view of events than the hadron colliders, said a report from the National Research Council, which this year recommended that Fermilab be the site of the proposed linear collider.

"We're not in the situation that occurred with the superconducting supercollider," said Rosenbaum. "Then you had several different U.S. sites all competing with Fermilab to win that facility. This time the entire American scientific community is backing Fermilab as the site."

No plans for the International Linear Collider have been drawn nor cost estimates made, but the machine would likely cost tens of billions to build.

Because the costs of these facilities are so large, no single country can expect to pay for everything. The United States, for example, kicked in more than half a billion dollars toward building the new Large Hadron Collider in Europe.